Month: May 2023

Book Review: ‘One Nation, Under God’ by Kevin M. Kruse

Perhaps the biggest, and certainly the divisive issue being debated in America right now is the question of just what kind of country the United States is, a secular democracy or a Christian nation. This question has been at the heart of our identity as a people since before we ever became a nation. It is an unquestioned fact that many of the colonists who came to this country before it was a country did so in order to be able to practice their religion their way. They hoped that in the ‘New World’ they could escape the religious wars and persecutions that had plagued Europe for centuries.

The Pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock is an iconic image in American history but it should be remembered that not all of the Mayflower’s passengers were Pilgrims hoping to follow their own religion. (Credit: UPI)

Well aware of how much blood had been spilled in Europe in the name of God the founding fathers went to considerable lengths to avoid any kind of favouritism toward one religion or another. This was a tricky little dance for them to accomplish because virtually all of the men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were nominally Christians, many rather fervent in their beliefs.

Some of our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson (l) were rather skeptical of the ‘magical’ aspects of the bible. Others, like the Reverend John Witherspoon (r), were more conventional in their faith. Despite their differences however they managed to work together to find the compromises that allowed our nation to come into being. (Credit: Wikipedia)

So it was that the Constitution never mentions God in any way while the Declaration limits itself to the vague terms ‘the creator’ and ‘divine providence’. In Thomas Jefferson’s words in the United States there was to be ‘a wall of separation’ between church and state. The key element of this wall was the very first amendment to the Constitution which demanded that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Freedom of religion is the first right guaranteed to all Americans.

Not one of the hundreds of religions in the world today have any real evidence to back up their claims to ‘divine truth’. If only we could accept that maybe we could learn to accept each other. (Credit: Research Features)

For most of our nation’s history that little dance worked pretty well, even while most Americans belonged to one Protestant denomination or another, exactly which was a private affair not a public one. There was a bit of trouble during the middle of the 19th century in incorporating the Catholics into American society and then later in accepting the Jews. For the most part however Americans let other Americans practice whatever religion they wished, at least they did so better than in other countries.

Less than 100 years ago religious hatred was still the cause of millions of people being murdered. (Credit: The National WWII Museum)

That’s all changed today as religion has become one of the most important political issues in the United States as evangelical Christians seek to impose their views and morals on a nation that is slowly growing more secular. As justification for their desire to impose their morality on others they maintain that the United States has always been a Christian nation and that all they seek to do is bring back ‘that old time religion’.

The way we like to think about that ‘Old Time Religion’. It was never really like that. (Credit: Etsy)

The development of the religious right and the myths it created for itself is the thesis for ‘One Nation Under God’, a new book by Princeton University Professor of History Kevin M. Kruse. Unlike some other historians who maintain that the mixing of religion and conservative politics began during the Eisenhower administration professor Kruse goes farther back to reveal how ‘Corporate America Invented Christian American’, to use the book’s subtitle.

Princeton University Historian Kevin M. Kruse, author of ‘One Nation Under God’. (Credit: The Daily Princetonian)
Cover art for ‘One Nation under God’ by Kevin Kruse. (Credit: Amazon)

In ‘One Nation Under God’ Professor Kruse details how the social programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the taxes needed to pay for them, caused rich plutocrats and their corporations to finance and nurture the beginnings of conservative Christianity. These wealthy, powerful men looked upon FDR’s social safety net as the beginnings of a Communist takeover of the USA and since Communism was anti-god they hoped to use God to fight FDR. As Kruse details the argument that these Christian Libertarian organizations promoted was one of ‘Freedom under God’, as being a part of this nation’s identity from the very beginning.

The policies and programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ were considered by many of the rich in this country to be nothing short of ‘Godless Communism’ and therefore they sought to use religion to fight them. (Credit: Redbubble)

So it was that Wall Street tycoons sought out sympathetic clergymen in the hope of organizing resistance to FDR’s social programs. Chief among these men of the cloth was Billy Graham whose influence is felt throughout the book. At the same time ‘One Nation Under God’ also outlines the way that Hollywood executives and stars were enlisted to help the cause.

Charismatic preacher Billy Graham is a central character in ‘One Nation under God’ because of the way he influenced millions of people as well as numerous politicians. (Credit: The New York Times)
Just as important to the ’cause’ of promoting religion in America were movie stars and producers. Here’s Cecil B Demille on the set of his first version of ‘The 10 Commandments’. (Credit: CBS News)

Still, the movement failed to stop the New Deal and it wasn’t until after World War 2 had ended, and with the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President that the religious right began to have any influence. As a part of his attempts to unite the country against the threat of the Soviet Union Eisenhower sought to bring God into the political life of the country. It was in fact during the Eisenhower administration that ‘In God we Trust’ was formally stamped onto every denomination of our money, that ‘Under God’ was inserted by law into the formerly secular pledge of allegiance and ‘One Nation Under God’ became the official motto of the United States.

It was only during Eisenhower’s time as President that ‘In God We Trust’ became the official motto of the United States. Ike’s folksiness, like a kindly grandfather, reminded people of the ‘Old Time Religion’ and helped him push religious ornamentation onto American politics. (Credit: International Currancy)

Eisenhower was not a complete victory for conservatives however because even as he brought God into government, he kept the New Deal. Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, regulations controlling the food industry, the banking industry and other industries remained to vex the rich, as did the high taxes needed to pay for them. Billy Graham may have been overjoyed with Eisenhower’s policies, but General Motors was left feeling unfulfilled.

Pushed through by President Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway System was the largest government program since FDR’s New Deal. While Eisenhower was fully committed to capitalism he still understood that they are some problems only the government can solve. (Credit: SFGATE)

Much the same thing happened during the Presidency of Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon. The Nixon administration was even more overtly religious than Eisenhower’s but again there was no push to eliminate the social safety net, which thanks to Lyndon Johnson now included Medicare. Nixon even went to far as to increase the power of government by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, which quickly became one the conservative movement’s most hated boogiemen.

Another big government program started by a ‘conservative’ president was Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency. (Credit: The New Republic)

It’s with the Nixon years that Professor Kruse ends ‘One Nation Under God’ and that’s my real problem with the book. You see it was only during the Reagan administration that the religious right finally succeeded in putting someone in the White House who would both champion God, and lower taxes on the rich. But Reagan as president is only briefly mentioned in the epilogue, as are the two Bushes and Clinton. The entire subject of ‘Culture Wars’ that are currently ripping the country apart is only mentioned twice.

Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention informs the world of the ‘Culture Wars’ in America. (Credit: YouTube)

It’s almost seems as if Professor Kruse needs another whole book to finish his story and I hope he does so. The union of Religion and Capitalism is arguably the most contentious issue in America today and while Professor Kruse has done an excellent job of illustrating the first half of the story we need to hear the complete tale.

The problem with ‘One Nation under God’ is that it ends too soon. It doesn’t complete the story of how we ever managed to get here! (Credit: CNN)

‘One Nation Under God’ is a very important book, and a well written one as well. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is trying to understand how our country got to where it is today. I only hope that in a few years I’ll be able to recommend volume 2 as well! 

Space News for May 2023: Space X’s Starship rocket has its first test, the Voyager space probes will continue to operate until at least 2026 while the European Space Agency’s JUICE space probe had a little problem.

Did you watch it, the first test launch of Space X’s huge Starship launch system that is? Several YouTube channels streamed the entire flight, after all this was the first full test launch of the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built. The test was certainly exciting, but then failed tests are usually more exciting than successful ones.

The first test launch of the most powerful rocket ever built looked good, for a while. (Credit: Engadget)

As I watched that first test on April 20th, it seemed for a while as if everything was going pretty well but then, about a minute into the flight the announcer declared that 28 of Starship’s 33 first stage engines were still firing. That of course made me wonder what had happened to the other five engines. Then, about a minute later it became obvious that the rocket was beginning to tumble out of control and a little more than three minutes into the flight the engineers were forced to self destruct Starship in order to prevent it flying completely out of control and doing any damage to something on the ground.

The beginning of the end for Starship. Those failed engines began forcing the rocket off course and eventually ground control ordered a self destruct. (Credit: Reuters)

That didn’t prevent all of the damage at the launch site however. Those five engines that failed first must have exploded right at ignition, based upon all of the debris that was hurled as much as 20 meters away from the launch pad. The pad itself sustained the most damage including a large crater directly beneath it. So extensive is the damage to Starship’s launch facilities that it will take several months to repair them before another Starship test launch can take place. On the other hand, Space X certainly doesn’t want to attempt another launch before they’ve figured out what went wrong on the first one, and that may take longer than repairing the damage that occurred.

There were obvious signs of damage to the launch pad after Starship’s launch. Damage that will take time to repair before another test launch. (Credit: France 24)

Now every engineer knows that failures happen, especially on first tests. I’ve certainly had my share. Space X CEO Elon Musk knows that and did not expect 100% success. Before the test flight he declared that if the giant rocket only ascended past the launch tower he would consider it a partial success. Designing and developing a huge rocket like Starship takes a lot of time and effort and testing, it’s only a matter of time before they get it right.

The road to success is built on trial and failure, every engineer knows that! (Credit: Security Sales & Integration)

Much worse is when you’ve done all the design and testing and something goes wrong with the completed product, especially when that product is on its way to the planet Jupiter and there’s absolutely no way to send someone to repair it. That could have been the fate of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) JUICE space probe. I discussed the JUICE mission back in February, see my post of 25 February 2023 , as a mission to explore three of Jupiter’s large, Galilean moons in order to determine if there are oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces. The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer or JUICE spaceprobe was launched on April 14th from the ESA’s launch facility in Kourou in French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. JUICE’s launch was successful, and within hours the probe was on its way to Jupiter and talking to ground control.

Launch od the European Space Agancy’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. (Credit: CNN)

As the probe began to deploy its solar panels and instruments however a problem arose with the antenna for JUICE’s Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), the instrument that it was hoped would peer beneath the icy surface of the moons to confirm the existence of those oceans. Based on images sent back by the spacecraft the antenna had only unfurled to about one third of its full 16 meter length.

This image takes me back. Testing in an anechoic chamber of the antennas of the JUICE space probe. (Credit: SatNow)

The theory was that a release pin had gotten stuck preventing the antenna from completely deploying. The engineers at the ESA hoped that by using the probe’s course correction engines they may to able to shake the pin loose but they took their time to study the problem. Since JUICE would not reach Jupiter until 2031 the engineers knew that they had plenty of time to consider the problem and come up with a clever trick to fix the antenna.

The JUICE-RIME antenna stuck about halfway. Fortunately the engineers at ESA managed to shake it loose and it’s now ready to go. (Credit: Spacenews)

Turns out they knew what they were doing. After several attempts to fix the problem, each attempt showing a little improvement, the problem was solved when the engineers fired a ‘Non-Explosive Actuator’. The antenna immediately unfurled to it’s proper length.

The Rime antenna unfurling after engineers fixed it problem. (Credit: ESA)

On the other hand sometimes equipment and systems can be so well designed and built that they far exceed their original design goals. Arguably the two best examples of such extraordinary engineering are the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes.

The Voyager space probes have been exploring our Solar System, and now our Galaxy for over 45 years. They just keep going and going. (Credit: NASA)

First launched back in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft were designed to conduct flybys of the four gas giant planets in the outer solar system; Voyager 2 is still the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. Once their original missions were completed however the two probes just kept working, sending back to Earth measurements of conditions in the outer solar system.

Real time data sent back from the Voyager 1 probe, still teaching us about the Universe after 45 years in space. (Credit: NASA)

And they are still working, forty-five years after launch both Voyager spacecraft have now entered interstellar space and are still sending back data, the first in situ observations we have of conditions between the stars. Still, nothing lasts forever and slowly but surely the energy provided to each Voyager by its three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) is decreasing. Someday the two Voyager probes will no longer have enough energy to radio their observations back to us and they will be lost forever. At launch the RTGs supplied each Voyager with 70 watts of power but the 88 year half life of the radioactive Plutonium has caused that output to decrease by around 30%.

A radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG. Radioactivity produces heat and heat can be converted to electricity. These units have provided the power the Voyagers need to keep working after 45 years. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In order to keep each spacecraft functioning for this long the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) have been turning off all unnecessary equipment such as the cameras and heaters to save power. The power loss on Voyager 2 had become so great that it was thought that by the end of the year one of the probe’s five remaining instruments would have to be shut off, with the loss of all that priceless data.

When we lose power we can resort to candles. Voyager doesn’t have that option. (Credit: KSAT 12)

Fortunately those engineers at JPL are some of the best in the world and they came up with a clever idea. The Voyager power system contains a device known as a voltage regulator that’s intended to eliminate spikes and surges in the power coming from the RTGs. With the drop in power from the RTGs there’s now much less danger of that happening and if they shut off the regulator they’d save enough power to keep Voyager 2 running as is with five remaining instruments until at least 2026, almost exactly 50 years after its launch.

The Jet Propulsion Labouratory in California, home to many of the space probes that have explored our Solar System. (Credit: NASA

The Voyager spacecraft have discovered so much, taught us so much about our solar system and now the galaxy beyond and thanks to the engineers at JPL they can continue to do so, more than 30 years longer than anyone ever expected them to.

Two stories about Particle Physics, and the Particles in one may Surprise You.

A freshman physics class in any college or university will for the most part deal with the movement and behavior of particles, that is objects with easily measurable and long lasting quantities like size, shape, mass, position etc, etc. As someone who grew up in a baseball family I freely admit that whenever I encounter the word ‘particle’ the first thought in my brain is something very like a baseball.

I’ll be the first to admit it, growing up in baseball family and becoming a physicist I do tend to think of elementary particles as little tiny baseballs! (Credit: The Conversation)

In that freshman physics class the students will learn about such other particle quantities as velocity, acceleration, and momentum while discussing collisions between particles, the forces between particles and so on. In other words freshman physics talks a lot about particles.

Collisions are rather complicated problems that really follow a few simple rules so they are a big topic in most freshman physics classes. (Credit: HyperPhysics Concepts)

Higher level physics is pretty much the same. Experimental physics is usually conducted at High Energy Particle Accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (A Hadron is a kind of sub-atomic particle) or deep underground where ‘Ghost Particles’ called Neutrinos are captured in huge vats of water. Today I’ll be discussing some recent studies in particle physics, the first concerning those ghost particles the neutrinos while the second concerns objects you might consider it strange to call particles, human beings.

For over 100 years now physicists have been studying collisions between elementary particles in order to learn more about them. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Neutrinos have fascinated physicists ever since Wolfgang Pauli first predicted their existence in order to ‘balance the books’ in beta radiation decay. Originally thought to be a single kind of particle with no electric charge and either no or very little rest mass (Neutrino = little neutral one in Italian) they have only gotten stranger as we’ve learned more about them. We now know that there are at least three distinct types, or generations of neutrino, the electron, muon and tau each named for the type of electron like particle they are generated with. Unlike other generations however, up, charm and top quarks for example, the three types of neutrino can oscillate from one type into the other into the other. This implies that neutrinos must have some rest mass, perhaps one millionth that of an electron.

Neutrinos make up three of the twelve different types of Fermions, that is particles that follow the rule of ‘No two identical particles in the same quantum state’. (Credit: PhysicsMasterClasses.org)

Like other Fermions each type of neutrino also has an anti-particle, or does it? You see in general anti-particles have the exact same mass but the opposite electric charge of their species of particle. However, since neutrinos have no electric charge there is a real possibility that neutrinos may be their own anti-particle and that would certainly be new physics.

First ever evidence for the existence of anti-matter, a photograph of a ‘positive’ electron by Carl Anderson. (Credit: Phys.org)

Now neutrinos are very difficult to study, they only rarely, very rarely interact with other kinds of particles. It’s estimated that the neutrinos generated in the Sun by fusion could go through a light year of solid lead and half would still come out the other side. Physicists who study neutrinos usually need sources of trillions of the particles in order to catch just a few.

In order to study neutrinos physicists have to build large detectors like this one at the Sudbury neutrino observatory. (Credit: Atlas Obscura)

Experimentalists decided that their best chance for determining if neutrinos were their own anti-particle was to use a very rare type of radioactive decay called a double beta decay that occurs in the isotope 76 of the element germanium, atomic number 32. Double beta decay happens when the nucleus emits two electrons and two anti-neutrinos at the same time while jumping up two spots in the periodic table to selenium, atomic number 34.

Double beta decay should happen as pictured on the left with two electrons and two neutrinos being emitted. But if the neutrino is its own anti-particle then the decay on the right is possible with only two electrons being emitted. (Credit: Quantum Diaries)

If the neutrino is its own antiparticle however then the two anti-neutrinos could annihilate each other and only two electrons would come out, electrons, the easiest particle to detect and measure. So what the experimentalists would have to do is measure the mass / energy of the germanium nucleus before the decay, and the mass / energy of the selenium nucleus after the decay and if the two electrons got all of the energy difference then there were no neutrinos and the neutrino is its own anti-particle.

Without any neutrinos conservation of energy would require that all of the energy has to go into the emitted electrons and that is something we can measure, barely. (Credit: Nitty Gritty Science)

Easier said than done. The experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) was carried out using 30 kg of germanium that had been enriched to 88% isotope 76, in nature isotope 76 makes up 7.75% of all germanium. The germanium was then surrounded by detectors to both find and measure the energy of any electrons that were emitted. In order to reduce as much as possible interference from other radioactive decays the experiment was conducted a kilometer and a half beneath the Earth’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, an old abandoned gold mine. After ten years of operation the collaboration of scientists that runs the experiment has just released its results, no neutrinoless double beta decays were observed by the experiment which sets new limits on the possibility that a neutrino could be its own anti-particle.

Part of the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. (Credit: Sciencesprings)

Of course just because you haven’t found something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, it could mean you just haven’t looked hard enough. So the physicists who ran the experiment are now planning a new experiment that will employ 1,000 kg of germanium in their search to learn more about the ‘Ghost Particle’.

Here’s a book I read as a teenager that really helped spur my interest in Physics. Even today physicists are fascinated by the neutrino. (Credit: AbeBooks)

Human beings are not generally thought of as ‘particles’ but in many ways can be treated as such. After all we each have a definite size and shape as well as mass so there are many circumstances where the involuntary motion of a person is exactly like any particle. That’s why we can use ‘crash test dummies’ as substitutes for real people in automobile safety testing because during the conditions of a crash the humans inside the car are really just particles.

If you think about it, crash test dummies are designed to replicate the ‘particle’ aspects of human beings while eliminating everything else. (Credit: CNBC)

There are even times when the voluntary motions of humans can be studied as particles and something of the laws governing that behavior learned. One well known example of this is when two groups of people, traveling in opposite directions have to move through each other, such as when two groups of pedestrians are trying to cross to opposite sides of the same street using the same crosswalk and have to go through each other.

In many ways large numbers of human beings each going there own way are very much like an ensemble of particles interacting with each other. (Credit: NAIOP Blog)

What has been observed in such circumstances is that the two groups will break up into a series of ‘lanes’ that will interleave with the lanes of the opposing group. These lanes then move past each other in what is technically known as two component flow. This type of phenomenon in general has been given the name ‘active matter’ and has been observed in many different kinds of animals from flocks of birds to schools of fish.

Thanks to modern computers even very complicated problems, like the crowd pictured here, can be analyzed and order found in all of the apparent chaos. (Credit: Science News)
Scientists have found that in order to form a school, fish only have to obey a few simple rules. (Credit: HuffPost)

While the development of lanes in groups of people moving in opposite directions has been studied for several decades no rigorous mathematical model of the behavior had been published. Until now, for a new paper in the journal Science by mathematicians at the University of Bath in the UK has presented a kinetic description of lane nucleation, in other words equations describing how lanes form and behave. The model was in fact based upon Albert Einstein’s description of ‘Brownian Motion’ of pollen grains in a solution.

As described by Albert Einstein, Brownian Motion was the first direct evidence for the existence of atoms. (Credit: Toppr)

The mathematicians have even teamed up with experimentalists at the Department of Human Motor Behavior at the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice in Poland to test their model. One of the experiments was set up in King’s Cross Station in London where groups of volunteers moved through different gates and obstacles. The movement of the volunteers was video recorded and in every case order arose out of chaos allowing the recordings to be compared to the model’s predictions.

The milling crowds at King’s Cross Station in London proved to be the perfect experiment for studying the ‘particle nature’ of human traffic. (Credit: iStock)

So it seems that the idea of a particle, so useful in physics, can also be applied to the study of living creatures, even we humans.

Industrial Chemicals continue to pollute the environment unabated, they are poisoning the water, the plants and animals and now two new Studies show how they are even getting into us as well.

In the last few centuries the science of chemistry has produced an uncounted number of miracle substances and materials that have played a major role in making modern civilization possible. Unfortunately many of those substances do not break down chemically once they have completed the job they were developed for. When we just throw them away they don’t just disappear but rather collect in the world around us until they become a nuisance or worse, a lethal hazard.

We live in a toss away culture. Once we no longer have any use for a thing we just toss it and so long as we can’t see it it no longer exists! (Credit: Shouse Law)

This dilemma first became an issue in the late 1950s and early 1960s when environmental scientists found that the insecticide Dichorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was building up in the streams and rivers causing enormous harm to fish and other wildlife. The manufacturers of DTT argued back. They declared that by killing disease carrying insects DDT had saved the lives of GIs fighting the Japanese in the jungles and islands of the Pacific in World War 2. Also after the war DDT had helped to eliminate malaria as a disease in the states along the Gulf coast. DDT had helped to make a large part of the US a healthier place to live.

The chemical formula and structure of DDT. It looks almost pretty. (Credit: Stockholm Convention)

All of that was perfectly true; DDT was a miracle, but a miracle that didn’t go away after it had served its purpose. When DDT was actually discovered in human mother’s milk even the manufacturers had to give up. Today the use of DDT is generally banned in the US although there are still some countries in the world where DDT continues to be used, if not always legally.

DDT was once thought to be so safe that it was sprayed in places where people gathered for fun in order to eliminate mosquitoes that could spread disease. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

However the politicians and the general public never learned the lesson of DDT, that miracle chemicals can become a real problem if we don’t properly dispose or recycle them. Instead it was the manufacturers who learned to never admit that their miracles could ever become a problem. So today we have the petroleum industry that at first denied that was is such a thing as global warming and now trying to convince us that they are the solution.

It was the tobacco industry that first learned how to fight back against all those do-gooders trying to make the world a better place. There was just too much money to be made poisoning stupid people for the industry to just admit to the truth. (Credit: Truth Initiative)

Now two new studies have taken a frightening look at how potentially dangerous ‘miracle’ substances that we just toss into the environment after we no longer want them, are coming back and literally getting inside us. The studies deal with plastics and the so-called ‘forever chemicals’ that we use to coat our non-stick cookware, along with hundreds of other uses. Substances that we really have little knowledge about what their long term effect in our bodies will be.

In many ways Teflon is a miracle of modern science. Once again however the problem is it doesn’t go away once we’re done with. And long term exposure isn’t healthy. (Credit: Science notes)

Let’s start with the plastics. One of the big reasons that plastics are so much a part of our modern economy is that they are so stable. Plastics are really nothing more than very long chains of carbon and hydrogen, two elements that like each other so much that they simply do not break down chemically. That’s why plastics have become such a big trash problem; all of the plastics that we throw away just build up in dumps or rivers or the ocean.

When a small chemical substance, a monomer, can be linked into long chains it forms a polymer, the basis of much of our modern world. (Credit: Jagran Josh)

While it’s true that plastics don’t break down chemically they can break down mechanically into smaller and smaller pieces. Your plastic soda bottle can, over the course of 30-50 years can become millions of tiny plastic micro-particles and nano-particles. And if you’re thinking that 30-50 years is a long time from now, remember all those 2-liter bottles you threw away back in the 1970s and 80s! A recent study estimated that there could be as much as 24.4 trillion pieces of micro-plastics in just the oceans.

Although plastics do not break down chemically they will get broken up mechanically into tiny ‘micro-particles’ that are now everywhere, including our food and water. (Credit: The Washington Post)

Those tiny plastic particles are now pretty much everywhere, they’re in the oceans, they’re in the soil, in fact they are so small that they’ve even gotten into the air. Plastic particles have been found in fresh snow falling in Greenland, thousands of kilometers from any trash dump. Tiny plastic particles are literally everywhere on the surface of the Earth.

Driven by the wind, plastic micro-particles are now even being found in the ice in Greenland. (Credit: Phys.org)

And they are in living creatures as well. Here’s how it works, whether it be ocean algae or grass in a field or vegetables in your garden the water and nutrients absorbed by plants now contains plastic micro and nano particles that are absorbed at the same time. As those plants are eaten, by fish or cows or you, the particles now get absorbed and concentrated. Think about it, a plant may have only a few plastic particles in it , but an animal eats a lot of plants so it ends up absorbing a few particles from each plant and winds up with a lot more particles. As you go higher up the food chain the concentration gets higher and since we humans are at the top the concentration will be highest in us.

It’s even being ironically called the new food chain. Plastics break out into micro-particles that get into living creatures and eventually the very food we eat, so it gets into us! (Credit: Dreamstime.com)

Now a new study from the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit collection of environmental scientists, has discovered that sewage sludge, the byproduct that remains after urban wastewater has been treated at sewage plants around the world, is heavily contaminated with plastic micro-particles. Now that sewage sludge is rich in nutrients and commonly used as organic fertilizer on over 80,000 sq. kilometers of farmland here in the US, and as much again in Europe. Even as the sludge fertilizes the soil it is also spreading tiny pieces of plastic, a contamination that, since plastics don’t break down chemically, just increases in concentration even while being absorbed by the plants grown on the land. Plastics that will eventually get into our bodies.

The sewage that we humans produce is actually good fertilizer, it contains all sorts of organic materials and valuable minerals. So it’s often spread over crop fields as fertilizer. (Credit: In These Times)

What long term harm those plastic micro-particles will do in the human body is unknown at present, studies on the effects of plastic in living creatures have only begun. As the years go by however, and the amount of plastic in us grows it certainly can’t be beneficial.

Nowadays however that sewage also contains plastic micro-particles and other, even more dangerous ‘forever chemicals’ (PFAS). Slowly but surely those substances are getting into us! (Credit: ecoRI News)

Of course there are other, more harmful chemicals that also are getting absorbed into our bodies. A case in point are the so-called ‘forever chemicals’ technically known as polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. Once again PFAS are extremely useful chemicals designed to be impervious to both water and heat and are commonly used in non-stick cookware, fire suppressant foam, fire resistant textiles and food packaging. However research has also clearly shown that PFAS are dangerous chemicals linked to health issues like liver disease, reduced immune responses and of course several types of cancer.

Forever chemicals are used in hundreds of different products we use everyday. We keep making more and more of these substances and since they never break down the concentration in the environment just increases and increases. (Credit: Drinking water quality)

The problem is again that once we no longer want our used cookware or clothing we simply throw the PFAS laden objects into the trash. The PFAS then wind up in a trash dump or landfill where they simply increase in concentration while at the same time leaking into the local groundwater, eventually contaminating streams and rivers throughout the country.

Far too many of our streams and rivers now look like this. Much of our drinking water comes from sources that are little better. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Now a new study published in the journal Environmental Research has analyzed tests for PFAS in over 500 wild caught freshwater fish from streams and lakes across the country. The results of the tests showed a median level of PFAS in the fish of 9,500 nanogrammes per kilogram. This is an amount 278 times greater than that permitted in farm raised, commercially sold fish. In fact the study concluded that the amount of PFAS a person would be exposed to by eating one wild caught freshwater fish was equal to drinking PFAS contaminated water for a month.

I like to fish, and I like to eat fish. So signs like this are not what I want to see but it’s the reality in far to many places today. (Credit: Michigan Radio)

So any freshwater fishermen out there, and I’m one of you, really need to be cautious about eating the fish you catch. Unless you’re certain that the location you’re fishing in is really clean, you’d better stick to catch and release. Not so much for the fish’s health as for yours.

Nice catch kid, but I wouldn’t eat it if I were you! (Credit: Livingston Daily)

Just two more examples of how our habit of just throwing away anything and everything we no longer have a use for is turning the entire planet into one big sewer.